feel included, when the latter would rather jump off a cliff than ride in a hot air balloon.
By chance he looked down and was astonished to see writing on the pages. The diary was the one true link he had to his mother, and its revelations were rare enough that his heart pounded. What did he need to know now?
25 April, YD 1021
The day before she died.
This is the worst yet, a blow so heavy that I am prostrate with grief.
It is a world on fire, everything burning. Somehow I discern figures flying through the storm of smoke. They are pursued urgently, by mages on wyverns towing spell accelerators.
Distance spell-casting can be deadly. Many incantations of the genre mete out mortal damage. And only the best equip themselves with spell accelerators.
I hold my breath. The very sky seems to be aflame. Spells fly. One of the fleeing mages falls. “No!” A scream pierces the night. “No!”
The falling mage does not strike ground. Instead some force breaks his fall twenty feet in the air. A flying carpet zooms down, and the rider pulls his body onto the carpet.
“Revivisce omnino!” the rider cries hoarsely. “Revivisce omnino!”
The fallen mage shows no reaction at all. He is dead then.
The spell is a powerful one, but not even the most powerful reviving spells can bring a mage back from the dead.
“Don’t you dare die! Not now! Don’t you dare, Titus!”
No, not my Titus.
Then I see his face, and it is my child, no older than his late adolescence and already felled.
As the world burns.
The vision has faded, but the damage is done. I have been destroyed.
Only yesterday I made Titus promise that he would do everything in his power to topple the Bane. He did, my solemn child who already had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
And this was his reward for that promise, a brutally short life and a violent death.
I have never hated myself more.
Next to me my son sleeps soundly. I kept him up deep into the night, wanting to spend as much time with him as possible before my execution. And he gamely stayed awake until exhaustion overtook him.
Could I? Could I, when he woke up in the morning, tell him to forget about Atlantis altogether and simply enjoy all the privileges that came with his station in life?
I almost shook him awake to do just that. But with my hand on his shoulder, I could proceed no further. One does not stand in the way of a future that has been revealed, not even if one were a vessel of the Angels.
After a long time of further hesitation, I opened my diary, which hardly leaves my side these days, and recorded this vision, placing it just behind the one in which I saw him moving about surreptitiously in the library of the Citadel, followed by a scene of Alectus and Callista crowded around the Inquisitor. I have not the slightest idea whether these visions form one unbroken thread of the future, but Titus, in the moment of his death, had on a hooded tunic that looked very much like the one he had worn in that vision.
When I am done, I will take my child’s hand and rest it against my cheek and I will apologize to him silently, endlessly. It will not make up for what I will take from him, but there is not much else that I can do.
Forgive me, my son.
Forgive me.
Titus could scarcely understand his mother’s words—the pages shook badly. And when he set the diary on his desk and clenched his still trembling hands at his sides, he found that he still could not see the letters—not through the moisture in his eyes that blurred and distorted every line.
The last words she had spoken to him, minutes before her execution, had been, Not all will be lost. And always he had comforted himself with the belief that she had found some measure of peace and equanimity.
Instead she had gone to her death shattered by what would happen to him.
Tears rolled down his face. He was already an adolescent. How much time did he have left? How much? Was it enough to accomplish this great task she had thrust upon him? In the Beyond, when they met again, he would like to reassure her that his years had not been brutally short after all, for no one who toppled the Bane could be said to have lived anything less than a remarkably full